Crows: 'there is something malevolent in the way they hang on half-closed wings'. Photograph: Marko Drobnjakovic/AP

Buttering bread in front of the kitchen window, I'm startled by a stramash in the alder halfway down the garden. Alders are sacred trees – the Welsh trickster Gwydion knew the warrior-king Bran by the sprigs of alder on his shield. This alder is doubly so, since my children named it "Jim" and spent much of their early years clambering up it.

Bran is inextricably linked with crows and ravens – the name means "crow" in Welsh – and a few of his namesakes are perched in the alder's branches staring intently at the lawn below, at something just out of view. Two more crows stand alert on the garden fence, and another on the wall facing it. All are focused completely on whatever lies beneath.

One by one, they swoop aggressively to the ground and moments later return, legs extended as they whirl round to land, like bell-ringers going in turn. Even through the closed window, their rasping clamour is loud, and there is something malevolent in the way they hang on half-closed wings before settling back.

Opening the back door sends all of them into the sky, complaining noisily as they retreat towards the oaks across the river. But I can see what the crows have been attacking. Lying in a corona of white down is a wood pigeon, a cushie-doo, poleaxed on its back.

A fraction of a second later, apparently returned from the dead, the pigeon has flipped itself over and is going hell for leather for the cover of the woods, beating wings whose ragged appearance reveals where it has lost feathers.

Not for the first time, I marvel at the astonishing resilience of these plump bumblers, which crash through foliage and gracelessly strut after crumbs but at the moment of crisis seem born survivors. There must be a thousand mnemonics for the five-syllabled cooing of a wood pigeon but mine is this: "I don't want – (pause) – to die."

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